Different pundits disagree about the impact of outsourcing and offshoring,
making it difficult to get a grasp on just what outsourcing is all about,
writes Steve Andriole, the Thomas G. Labrecque Professor of Business at
Villanova University. At heart, outsourcing is simply about companies
identifying their core competencies, the distribution and segmentation of
expertise, and managing costs. Many companies are deciding they no longer
want to be involved in numerous technical businesses, and at the same time,
IT expertise has been distributed all over the world, rather than being
heavily concentrated in the United States. ACM's recently released
report," Globalization and Offshoring of Software," which Andriole worked
on, argues that outsourcing is a good thing that in fact creates more jobs
than are eliminated. There is a tight connection between globalization and
offshoring in the software industry, with both expected to grow, and
economic theory and anecdotal evidence indicate that developed and
developing countries can both benefit from offshoring between them.
However, the outcomes of comparative advantage can sometimes be unpleasant,
particularly when the trends and opportunities are badly managed by the
parties involved. Offshoring can be expected to increase, but it is hard
to determine the specifics of the increase; in addition, existing risks are
magnified by offshoring and new threats to things such as privacy and
national security are created. While standardized jobs were the first to
be offshored, higher-end skills such as research are expected to rise in
demand as global competition intensifies.
To view a copy of report from the ACM Job Migration Task Force, visit
http://www.acm.org/globalizationreportClick Here to View Full Articleto the top

Panelists at the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Road Show 2006 said
that America's global competitiveness in computer technology will hinge on
innovation and the search for future breakthroughs. "I view globalization
as a challenge to really step up and identify, as was mentioned earlier,
sort of the cutting-edge aspects," said George Johnson, associate dean for
special programs in the engineering college at UC Berkeley; "One out of 10
of those next big things might actually be the next big thing. You have to
be pushing and pushing and pushing." Silicon Valley defied predictions of
Japan overtaking it in recent decades by farming out memory-chip production
so it could focus on developing chips that were more interesting, said
Carnegie Mellon West dean Jim Morris. The United States lacks the numbers
to compete on commodity-only activities, said Johnson, and Morris disagreed
with the notion that offshoring eliminates available jobs and makes
computer science unattractive. Research indicates considerable demand for
software engineers, said Morris, and panelists emphasized giving students
the flexibility to look into technical disciplines. For example, a biology
student could also study technology, according to UC Santa Cruz Chancellor
Denise Denton, who said that "People really surf through boundaries now."
The show also included demonstrations of technologies Microsoft is
developing in such fields as parallel computing and Internet search.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

A proposal from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) would decouple the issue of
H-1B visas from the other immigration-related issues that have lately
attracted controversy. The "Securing Knowledge, Innovation and Leadership"
bill, known as the Skil Bill for short, would raise the annual ceiling on
H-1B visas to 115,000 and would provide the option to raise the cap each
year by 20 percent based on employers' needs. In addition, the bill
recommends that any professional with a post-graduate degree from an
accredited U.S. university be exempted from the annual H-1B cap, and it
proposes that employers be allowed to pay a premium fee to expedite an
immigrant petition's processing. Also provided for under the bill would be
a "precertification system" for streamlining some petitions. Many of the
Skil Bill's provisions are included in other legislation before Congress,
but the other bills are more comprehensive, lacking the Cornyn bill's
narrow focus on H-1B visas. A spokesman for the lobbying group Compete
America, which supports the bill, said that it "helps set free the H-1B
issues from other immigration reform issues that might have less chance of
moving forward."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

DARPA is sponsoring yet another self-driving vehicle challenge just seven
months after a driverless Volkswagen SUV won $2 million for being the first
out of 23 contestants to complete a 132-mile race over the Mojave Desert.
The new challenge, scheduled for November next year, will pit contestants
in a 60-mile test course simulating city conditions, replete with moving
vehicles, sharp turns, intersections, and obstacles such as utility poles
and trees. The first vehicle to complete the course successfully will win
$2 million, with $500,000 going for second place and $250,000 for third.
The winning cars must be able to obey traffic laws, change lanes, merge
onto oncoming traffic, and park. They will have to carry out a mock supply
mission within six hours. The eventual goal is to come up with a unmanned
vehicle capable of functioning in battlefield conditions. Last year's
winner, Stanford University computer scientist Sebastian Thrun, says the
contest furthers the advancement of artificial intelligence knowledge that
could be used to develop self-navigating ''smart cars'' on highways.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

During a keynote address at the second symposium in the Innovations in
Education series this week in Qatar, Carnegie Mellon University computer
science and robotics expert Raj Reddy, formerly co-chair of the U.S.
President's Information Technology Advisory Commission under President
Clinton, spoke of the need to develop multi-lingual interfaces, spoken
language interfaces, and multi-lingual translation systems to ensure a
global population of e-literates. "Developing programs to overcome
language barriers and building of domain-specific capacity, content, and
partnership for education should" should be on the agenda, said Reddy, who
is currently working on the Million Book Digital Library project with the
aim of creating a digital collection of all human knowledge and providing
free access. It currently has some 600,000 books, but plans call for the
Universal Library to offer a free-to-read, search collection of 10 million
books within 10 years that anyone can access over the Internet at any time.
Reddy says providing affordable, accessible education to the world's poor
is one of the grand challenges of emerging economies, and he believes that
inexpensive computing devices can help meet that goal. He says, "Soon PCs
may break the $100 barrier and thus it will be possible to have PC access
at rural homes or village schools for $3 or $4 per month." Current
projects Reddy is working on include an all-in-one information appliance
called PCtvt designed for illiterate users, Learning by Doing, and FTTV:
Fiber To The Village Project. Reddy was awarded the ACM Turing Award in
1994.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The National Science Foundation's InfoBrief says industrial financing for
research and development (R&D) in science and engineering (S&E) sectors at
colleges and universities fell 2.6 percent in fiscal year 2004, to $2.1
billion. This was the third consecutive year that industry funding
dropped, having fallen 1.1 percent in 2003 and 1.5 percent in 2002.
Industry financed 4.9 percent of academic R&D in fiscal year 2004, versus
7.4 percent in 1999. The report also found that R&D expenditures in the
computer sciences rose 7.7 percent in present dollars, to $1.4 billion, and
accounted for 3.3 percent of overall academic R&D expenditures in S&E. The
NSF and the Department of Defense were the two biggest sources of funds for
computer science, at $411 million and $303 million, respectively.
Adjusting for inflation, academic R&D in S&E increased 4.7 percent in
fiscal year 2004. Seventy-five percent of R&D expenditures were for
fundamental research. The leading 20 institutions in terms of expenditures
comprised 30 percent of overall academic R&D spending, and the leading 100
research performers comprised 80 percent of spending.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Researchers involved in the ADAPT project are calling their effort to test
a model of the human sense of presence a success. Using a robot modeled on
the torso of an infant, the researchers initially focused on the emergence
of the perception of self in the environment in the development of a human
baby, then developed a process model of consciousness. The model for
BabyBot was one of action, cognition, and perception, and was equated with
how the perception of an object is ongoing for a baby. A young child
learns perspective if he or she is unable to reach an object that is seen,
and babies that are able to reach an object are likely to taste it or shake
it to learn more about it. In the experiments, the researchers had BabyBot
touch an object, which showed that the robot was able to distinguish
objects from the background, and then grasp the object, to learn about the
specific properties of the object. The ADAPT project will now give way to
another IST project in ROBOTCUB, which will focus on giving the robot the
ability to see, hear, and touch its environment, and later crawl. The
research has the potential to apply how humans understand perception to
machines, giving them the ability to perceive and interact with their
environment in a similar manner. "Ultimately, this work will have a huge
range of applications, from virtual reality, robotics and AI, to psychology
and the development of robots as tools for neuro-scientific research," says
Giorgio Metta, ADAPT project coordinator and assistant professor at the
Laboratory for Integrated Advanced Robotics at Genoa University in
Italy.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Sixty-four finalists will vie for $150,000 in prize money at the 2006
TopCoder Open starting Wednesday at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. The
finalists are the best of the best among the thousands of script coders who
have been competing for months online. This year's event is being
sponsored by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which hopes to push multicore
development strategies. Intel has been sponsoring the monthly online
competitions in which program developers solve problems that stress
techniques for systems using chips with multiple processing cores. The
heat generated by fast single-core processors is too much for systems to
handle anymore. Companies such as Intel and AMD are releasing chips with
two processing cores that run at slower clock speeds than single-core
products. This means that software written in a single-threaded manner
will run slower on these new chips, which require software written in
independent threads running parallel rather than in sequence. This will be
a focus of the competition. Analyst Dean McCarron says, "If you want your
application to continue to scale in performance with the PCs that are being
sold, your application needs to incorporate more parallelism." TopCoder
has about 80,000 registered developers from around the world, 35,000 from
the United States. TopCoder will select winners in various categories,
including algorithm, component design, and component development.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Penn State researchers presented the paper "Privacy-preserving Semantic
Interoperation and Access Control of Heterogeneous Databases" at the recent
ACM Symposium on Information, Communication and Computer Security in
Taiwan. In the paper, the researchers describe the development of new
software that allows databases to communicate with each other without
jeopardizing the security of their data and metadata. The
Privacy-preserving Access Control Toolkit (PACT) is designed to act in the
manner of a filter by encrypting queries, data communicated, and other
information. "The software automatically regulates access to data, so some
information can be exchanged while other data remains confidential and
private," explained Prasenjit Mitra, assistant professor of information
sciences and technology at Penn State. "Often when we implement security,
we decide not to give access to data." The researchers took a more generic
approach to designing PACT compared with the special-purpose applications
that organizations develop for sharing data, which are expensive, take more
time to develop, and do not address security issues. Research on PACT will
continue with the development of a new rule language to enhance
interoperability as well as improvements to boost the performance of query
processing.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Intel plans to develop a below-$400 Eduwise laptop for educational use,
and also invest $1 billion in global education as part of its "World Ahead"
initiative to expand access to computers and expand its own market
presence. Intel's five-year, $1 billion investment will go toward wireless
Internet infrastructure and teacher training. Intel CEO Paul Otellini
plans to detail Intel's vision in a speech on May 2, 2006, at the World
Congress on Information Technology. Advanced Micro Devices also is
designing an inexpensive laptop for debut in 2015. MIT Media Lab
co-founder Nicholas Negroponte is developing a sub-$100 notebook that can
be used for education in third world areas. Intel's commitment will double
its current financing for similar programs, and will encompass teacher
training for 10 million teachers around the world. Intel says its Eduwise
computer will be able to run Microsoft software, while other inexpensive
computers in development are being designed for open-source software or
reduced versions of Microsoft tools.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Although women comprise 50 percent of the workforce and 30 percent of
physicians and attorneys, less than 10 percent of women are engineers,
writes Jeanette Horan, IBM's senior location executive at Silicon Valley.
However, she writes that "I believe that we are now at a tipping point for
women of all ages in technology," adding that the opportunity for a larger
number of women to have successful engineering careers is greater now than
previously. Horan explains that this is because technology firms badly
need skilled employees. She thinks that with the right encouragement,
young women will go after analytic subjects in school and technical
careers. She says there are an increasing number of corporate measures
directed at enabling female students in kindergarten through the 12th grade
to evolve academically, and to offer girls the skills they need to get
high-paying technical jobs. "And enlightened companies will create
succession plans for women at the top and throughout the employee ranks,"
Horan writes. She relates how Silicon Valley's MentorNet teams
undergraduate and post-doctorate students studying engineering and science
with mentors from academia, government, and industry, reaching over 12,000
students from 100 higher education institutions. Horan adds that IBM has
400 volunteer mentors linked with MentorNet.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Cornell University researchers have found that the Web's addressing system
is archaic and needs patching if not replacement. In a study of some
600,000 computers, the researchers found that more than a third of Internet
sites are susceptible to simple attacks--a number that could increase to 85
percent if a more sophisticated denial-of-service attack were launched
concurrently--due to the Net's reliance on an average of 46 computers each
holding different information about the components of a net address that
must be consulted when a site is visited. This chain of dependency creates
vulnerabilities. "The growth of the Internet has caused these dependencies
to emerge," says computer science professor Emin Gun Sirer of Cornell.
"Instead of having to compromise one you can compromise any one of the
three dozen...The domain name system has been incredibly successful so far
but it is showing its age. We need to re-think the entire naming
infrastructure of the Internet." One solution would involve utilization of
a peer-to-peer type structure for domain addresses. The research also
found that 17 percent of the servers that host Net address books are
vulnerable to attack from well-known threats. Sirer says, "Because of
these dependencies about one-third of the Net's names are trivially
compromisable by script kiddies." For example, Sirer found that one of the
five computers that act as the first reference point to the fbi.gov domain
still has not been patched to protect against a common bug. Although the
FBI fixed the problem once informed, Cornell researchers say hundreds of
thousands of sites remain vulnerable.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

A group of technology vendors, radio frequency identification (RFID)
users, and consumer groups issued a series of best practices about RFID
tags on Monday to allay consumers' worries about the technology. Privacy
advocates have warned that RFID could facilitate corporate and government
surveillance of people's movements and transactions as the technology's
scanning capabilities become wider-ranging. The Center for Democracy and
Technology's (CDT) Working Group on RFID recommends that companies using
RFID tags notify customers in all cases, tell customers if they can turn
off the tags, and embed security. In addition, the group advises companies
that collect personally identifiable data via RFID tags to disclose how
that data will be employed to customers; the working group's best practices
report says options for customers to opt out of sharing personally
identifiable information and to destroy the tags "must be readily
available." The report goes on to say that "consumers should know about
the implementation and use of any RFID technology...[but] it is important
to recognize that notice alone does not mitigate all concerns about
privacy." According to the CDT report, companies using RFID should give
customers "reasonable" access to the information collected by the tags, and
should notify customers of their RFID use prior to the completion of
transactions. "These new guidelines show how RFID can provide great
benefit to society, while treating customers' privacy with respect,"
declared Microsoft researcher Steve Shafer.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Cell phone companies are starting to use technology that uses signals from
cell towers and occasionally global-positioning satellites to find the
location of cell phones, while cities such as San Francisco, Houston, and
Philadelphia are planning to build citywide Wi-Fi networks. This new
technology and data may change urban planning and the way residents
interact. It may also help cities become more efficient. The disadvantage
of this is that it may be an invasion of privacy since it can track where
people are at all times. The data can be put on a map to show how a city's
population moves and changes throughout the day, which technologists think
is a good idea. "We're trying to create a human-computer interface with
cities," says MIT graduate student Assaf Biderman. City planners, real
estate developers, and retailers will be able to see where people go at
what times, which will help them make better decisions about roads,
buildings, and services. Traffic patterns will also be able to be
detected. This past April, Houston approved a contract to install 1,500
parking meters that will connect to the Net via Wi-Fi, which will help
locate parking spaces. There is a downside to all this, such as hackers
and spam, but experts say it may help solve some old problems.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

It is a formidable challenge for designers of wireless mobile devices to
reduce power consumption while augmenting system performance to satisfy
consumer demand for more applications and functionality. They must
consequently explore power management issues from a holistic perspective
that encompasses both hardware and software. Software architecture is a
key determinant of system-level power management. Many software power
management algorithms fulfill the design objective by facilitating some
form of voltage or frequency scaling synchronous with hardware support, but
power reduction only satisfies half the requirements of high-performance,
power-sensitive applications. Dynamic system adaptation enables high
performance with lower power consumption, and this goal can only be reached
by creative new power reduction methods that span functional blocks and
incorporate multiple processing cores. Texas Instruments' SmartReflex
technology, which optimizes power consumption on silicon intellectual
property, SOC design, and systems software levels, offers the system-wide
perspective necessary to deliver dynamic power management. SmartReflex
technologies support multiple cores, hardware accelerators, functional
blocks, peripherals, and other system elements, and are open to OS-based
and high level power management algorithms that enable the development of a
collaborative and cooperative power/performance environment.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

America's maintenance of its global innovation leadership depends greatly
on what roles industry and government play in research and development.
Kei Koizumi of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
reports that federal R&D budgets are on a general decline, while the Office
of Personnel Management finds that the number of federally employed
scientists has experienced a slight drop in recent years. Institute for
Defense and Homeland Security executive director Hugh Montgomery says the
government is taking less of a lead role in applied research, and cites the
diversion of funding from federal research organizations to the Defense
Department for President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative and the
peace dividend fueled by Soviet Russia's implosion as critical factors in
the reduction of applied research spending. Meanwhile, James Decker with
the Department of Energy's Office of Science points to a fall-off of basic
research investment among industrial labs. National Security Personnel
System program executive director Mary Lacey says the government-industry
relationship has become less of a one-way street as a result of a shift in
the driving forces underlying innovation. Whereas the government used to
permit industry to commercialize many federally-developed technologies,
nowadays companies often develop commercial technologies that the
government can adopt. The difficulty proponents of higher government R&D
investment encounter in convincing cost-conscious lawmakers to allocate
more funding is significantly attributable to a lack of quantifiable data
on how important federal spending is to innovation, according to Koizumi.
George Washington University professor Nicholas Vonortas notes that the
nonprofit nature of government organizations makes it difficult to gauge
the impact of R&D.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Computerworld recently asked six leading computer science professors what
they think the future holds for computer science. Overall, the professors
have an optimistic outlook on the future of the CS discipline despite
falling enrollments, a lack of concentration on real-world issues, and
fading prestige. Cornell University professor Kenneth P. Birman views CS
as a "universal science" whose ubiquity is growing, while Princeton
University professor Bernard Chazelle says CS provides a "conceptual
framework for other disciplines." Chairman of UC Berkeley's electrical
engineering and computer science department John Canny says how people use
computers and what can be done to improve that use must be studied. "Since
most people are doing knowledge tasks, that means machines understanding
their owners' work processes much more deeply, finding semantically
appropriate resources with or without being asked, critiquing choices and
suggesting better ones, and tracking synergies with other groups within a
large organization," he explains. The professors offer a range of
suggestions on what areas of CS will boast the most important and
intriguing advances in coming years, including artificial intelligence,
algorithms, statistical data processing, databases, and service-oriented
architectures. To counteract students' disinterest or downright antagonism
toward CS as a career choice, the professors recommend reforming
educational curricula to focus on CS' "big ideas" rather than tedious
programming, particularly in high school. Also key is debunking the idea
that domestic, well-paying CS jobs are scarce or in danger of being
outsourced. The professors agree that CS needs the equivalent of Carl
Sagan or Stephen Hawking to popularize the field and rekindle public
interest. Carnegie Mellon University director of the Language Technologies
Institute Jaime Carbonell, Carnegie Mellon University dean of the school of
computer science Randal Bryant, and Stanford University Chairman of the
department of computer science William J. Dally were also interviewed.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

There is increasing interest in geospatial initiatives that utilize 3D
data, and Fred Limp with the University of Arkansas' Center for Advanced
Spatial Technologies reports that the 3D boom is being fueled by the "push"
of technology and the "pull" of business reasons behind the use of the
technology. The core drivers of 3D technology include basic computer
system refinements, such as better memory, disks, display, and graphics
performance. These are needed to support such things as stereo viewing.
Another major technology push is the fast development and expanding use of
LIDAR, which for many offers a quicker and more precise elevation data
acquisition methodology. The 3D explosion is also being spurred by
advancements beyond the traditional geospatial market, such as significant
growth in the CAD 3D data generation tools and the visualization and
animation software sectors. "Motion capture" is yet another key 3D
technology that is driving up interest. Product lines and professions
associated with 3D content are just as diverse as the content itself:
Geospatial software generates and maintains geographical data; HDS and
terrestrial photogrammetry document the existing world's features in
detail; animation software places all inputs within a narrative framework;
and motion capture inserts active humans in the resulting environment.
Gaming and high-end simulation software engines possess, in addition to the
above components, the capability to define visual processes based on
underlying physics and object interaction.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is undertaking a
pair of complementary efforts that could potentially augment digital
library content management and provide the means for substantially enhanced
identifier interoperability. The first effort is an investigation into
interoperability's practical ramifications across the ISBN and related
identifiers, and the second effort involves the deployment of an
ontology-based data dictionary that could supply a mechanism for the
ISO/IEC 21000-6 standard. A brainstorming session between an ad hoc group
of representatives of TC46 SC9 registration authorities conducted under the
aegis of the ISO TC46 technical committee yielded several possible
approaches to more in-depth exploration of identifier interoperability
issues, including probing into requirements for additional identifiers and
requirements for typed links between identifiers; creation of a
taxonomically organized glossary to support the development of all TC46 SC9
standards; extension of the glossary's relevant components into a "starter
set" of reference descriptive metadata that can be customized for
application to specific identifier standards; and advancement of a plan to
enable interoperability between descriptive metadata sets. The work
already carried out in the -based interoperability studies and
development for ISO/IEC 21000-6 corresponds precisely with the above
activities. The project outlined a methodology for semantic
interoperability that facilitates rich interchange between metadata
schemas. The ISO/IEC 21000-6 MPEG Rights Data Dictionary (RDD) has one
clear initial function: To support the MPEG Rights Expression Language
(REL). The adoption of ISO/IEC 21000-6 could be promoted as a solution to
other projects that face the same semantic interoperability challenges.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top